An Interview with Chia-liang Kao (O'ReillyNet) [LWN.net]

O'ReillyNet talks with Chia-Liang Kao, the creator of the SVK source code management system. "SVK allows distributed development using existing infrastructure, which means you don't need to deploy a new system for your whole organization. SVK works best with Subversion, but you can also seamlessly branch from CVS, Perforce, or even git repositories. SVK lets you commit directly back to Subversion repositories and 'commit as a patch' to other systems or to Subversion repositories you don't have commit access to."

(Log in to post comments)

Overwhelmed

Posted Sep 21, 2005 16:53 UTC (Wed) by davidw (subscriber, #947) [Link]

I am tired of hearing about new CVS replacements. I am pretty happy with CVS even though it's not perfect, and don't really want to switch until one of these competitors looks to be good, strong, and in it for the long haul, and some of the others have been more or less weeded out.

Overwhelmed

Posted Sep 21, 2005 17:45 UTC (Wed) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

On the other hand, after trying some alternatives (primarily subversion and git), CVS feels like an ugly unfinished hack. Why doesn't "cvs log" work the way it should? How do I list all branches? Why does "cvs diff" between two branches include references to files that were removed from both branches years ago? How do I find the branchpoints if they were not explicitly tagged? How do I refer to a specific revision of the tree without using a date? How do I refer to a certain revision of the tree on a branch, even using a date?

I'm even thinking about switching some SourceForge project to git and keeping the git repository in CVS. SF admins won't be amused, I'm afraid. I'm so frustrated with CVS that I'll switch to whatever SourceForge chooses, although my preference is git. Don't get me wrong, git needs lots of work, especially in the bandwidth department, but it has been usable from the very beginning (especially when wrapped by cogito).

Overwhelmed

Posted Sep 21, 2005 19:04 UTC (Wed) by pcharlan (guest, #29128) [Link]

I felt as you're describing (CVS is sometimes frustrating but good enough, and how to choose among the many alternatives, each with its own drawbacks) until I spent a day reading the Subversion docs and experimenting with it.

Converting from CVS to Subversion was easy (both technically and for our many non-technical CVS users), the documentation is well-written, and Subversion is mature and seems obviously in it for the long haul.

I can't imagine putting up with CVS anymore after working with Subversion.

Perhaps I'd be saying this no matter which modern version control system I'd switched to. I didn't experiment with any of the others, in part because our internal training favored something reasonably similar to CVS. Maybe there's even someone who switched to Subversion and regretted it; if so, perhaps they can explain why. But I expect you'll prefer Subversion over CVS.